In a brutal video that’s gone viral, rapper-actor Yasiin Bey, a k a Mos Def, is clad in an orange jumpsuit and recoils against restraints as a doctor tries to put a feeding tube up his nose. He resists. He sobs. He wriggles out of his restraints.

It’s the latest production by a London-based law firm determined to get its captive clients out of Guantánamo. But there’s a problem, says Army Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale, the Pentagon spokesman for Guantánamo policy, “It doesn’t comport with our procedures.”

Breasseale, who’s never actually seen a forced-feeding at Guantánamo and earlier in his career served as the U.S. Army’s envoy to Hollywood, was at first reluctant to offer a review. “We don’t provide commentary on theatrical productions,” he said.

But, unlike other members of the U.S. military who wouldn’t comment, he called it “a clever bit of cause marketing by Reprieve and the Guardian,” the British newspaper that first posted it.

That’s the point. Reprieve, the London law firm that catapulted Guantánamo’s hunger strike onto The New York Times’ op-ed page with a prisoner’s first-person account, has captured the public’s imagination with the native New York rapper’s failed dramatization of a captive’s forced-feeding.

The lawyers released the video on the eve of Islam’s holy month of Ramadan, and, as it happens, hours before a U.S. District Court judge called Guantánamo’s tube-feeding practice “painful, humiliating and degrading.” The judge, Gladys Kessler, said she was powerless to act on the request of Syrian captive Jihad Diyab, 41, to stop the Pentagon from force-feeding him.

Reprieve represents Diyab and 16 other prisoners at Guantánamo, where the prison said 106 captives were on hunger strike Tuesday —45 of them listed for tube feedings.

Lawyers for Diyab and three other captives asked the federal court in Washington, D.C., to stop the feedings. Kessler said the person with the power to do it is President Barack Obama.

At the White House Tuesday, spokesman Jay Carney defended the policy.

“The president said in April, we do not want these individuals to die,” he said.

Carney added that Obama “understands that this is a challenging situation,” then referred reporters to the Justice and Defense Departments for “specifics about the hunger strikers and then the litigation itself.”

In London, Reprieve attorney Cori Crider said the video wracked up 2 million hits in the first day. It also stole the thunder of the military’s latest bid to ease tensions at the prison of 166 captives staffed by about 2,000 employees — Navy nurses, Army guards, contract linguists and librarians and a little mentioned intelligence unit.

At 6 p.m. Monday, said Navy Capt. Robert Durand, the military issued a “Ramadan pardon,” excusing some disciplinary offenses and restoring “some privileges lost” for this, the 12th Ramadan at the prison camps in Cuba for most of Guantánamo’s captives.

About 40 detainees, none of them hunger strikers, were released from nearly 90 days of lockdown, up to 22 hours daily in their solitary cells. The prison was letting some captives eat and pray together during Ramadan, provided they voluntarily went to their solitary cells to be locked inside for six hours a night.